The subject matter disclosed herein generally relates to wireless systems, and more particularly to scheduling of sensor data acquisition in a wireless sensor system.
In a wireless sensor system, wireless sensor nodes communicate with a server to provide both status information and sensor data. Communication latency within a wireless network can vary from node-to-node. Differences in signal strength, distance, noise sources, power level, and other factors can contribute to communication latency variations. Differences in latency can also be due to particular wireless protocol message transmission methods. For example, time division multiplexing, where each node has its own time slice during which communication with the node can occur, results in latency variations for a common message broadcast to all nodes. Additionally, communication latency can vary over time as environmental conditions change. Therefore, accurately anticipating and correcting for communication latency can be challenging in a wireless sensor system. Differences in communication latency can result in poor synchronization among wireless sensor nodes when using a broadcast message to initiate data acquisition at multiple wireless sensor nodes simultaneously.